The Art of Map Illustration

Inspirational and creative. This books shows you how to create smart and interactive maps. The tutorials are helpful with easy illustrated instructions and interesting sources.

A lovely book that shows you how to create interactive maps. The tutorials are very helpful with colourful illustrations.

Very informative and easy to follow. I love this book and how helpful it is.

This book surprised me in many ways. It has information on hand-drawn/illustrated maps and on digitally made maps. There are how-tos and a lot of information on which materials to use. What really grabbed my attention - and made me sharpen my pencils - were the wonderful pictures of artistic maps. I wanted to try it out myself. I might add some maps to my future travel diaries.

I'm considering making this book a coffee table book, just because of the pictures.

I learned so much about the art of map making. Such gorgeous pictures and illustrations. I learned a lot about art.

Easy to follow and well illustrated.

A lot of good tips to making a fun and informative map while still being easy to follow and not so detailed that it becomes complicated.

I LOVE THIS BOOK. Four well-known artists provide suggestions on drawing tools, professional tips and step-to-step guides on how they create hand-drawn and digital maps. The page design and provided finished artworks are unbelievably gorgeous, and I know even if there aren't any tutorials, I would still add it to my collection. I love the part of creating visual details for every single location, personalizing an illustrated map makes a trip even more meaningful and memorable. Imagine creating a map for every trip to a new country and put them on your bedroom wall --- as you look at the maps you created, not only do they remind you of the trips you had, but also you're visually looking at your journey all over the wall!
With this book in hand, I will start creating my own after I finish my next trip, and I won't hesitate to grab a copy when this book hit the shelves.
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Overall: 5/5
Writing: 5/5
Cover: 4.5/5
Appealing: 5/5
Content: 5/5
Illustrations: 5/5
Page Design: 5/5
Will I buy it? YES.

BigFoot Visits the Big Cities of the World: A Spectacular Seek and Find Challenge for All Ages, by D.L. Miller is a recommended children's book that mixes fiction with non-fiction.

As an interactive story, children will learn about major cities around the world, as they search for the hidden BigFoot. Some of the cities featured are San Francisco, Toronto, New York City, London, Paris, Venice, Athens, Istanbul, Tokyo, etc.

This book is divided into various sections, such as Who Is BigFoot, Spotted in Paris, Visits New York City, Arrives in Athens, Appears in London, Visits Venice, Found in Tokyo, Spotted in Toronto, Seen in San Francisco, Discovers the Forbidden City, and Found in Istanbul. Plus, there are helpful hints about what to seek out on the specific pages.

BigFoot Visits the Big Cities of the World is an easy-to-read book that's informative and educations. This book is geared towards younger readers, particularly ages five to twelve.


Note: I received this book from NetGalley, which is a program designed for bloggers to write book reviews in exchange for books, yet the opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Having travelled a lot within Australia both for work and family, I have always been interested in preserving some aspect f my trips in a journal and more recently to incorporate this into a fibre piece. Unfortunately I have never known where or how to start - this book certainly helps in giving ideas and focusing the aspects of map making that is relevant personally. Whilst the book give design ideas, it also has a gallery at the end with artist's interpretation of map such as word maps in place of actually map illustrations.
Personally I prefer the place map version which are the main feature in this book. There are hand drawn ideas for streets, labelling, adding places of interest and generally illustrated the special feature in a map. There is also a small section on incorporating Photoshop design skills.
I could do things with the ideas in this book.

This was an interesting book on four different styles of map making. Each style was full of wonder for the art of cartography using novel ways to produce their maps which included many dimensions and information.

There are four artists who have written a chapter in the book.  Each artist shows their own unique style of creating maps, be it drawing it by hand on paper or wood or using digital software, adding wonderful features such as tourist attractions or beautifully painted trees to give a small scale map further dimension and interest. Alternatively, detailed images of points of interest are added to a larger scale map of a region.  Maps of the universe and the brain are also shown as an alternative to the traditional street map.

A combination of pencils, pens, highlighters and water colours are used to create some of these maps or all the details and colours are added with software.

There are numerous tips throughout the book, and each artist provides details on how to build up a map.  There is a portfolio of the artists work at the end of their respective chapters.

I received this book from netgalley in return for a honest review

I love to travel, journal, create a custom map when I do travel and this book is perfect for me it has a ton or great ideas and examples without the reading needed to buy any special tools. If you enjoy keep a travel journal this book is must for you.

This is the book you never knew you needed. Learn to make your own modern maps of cities, familiar places, and more. Cartographers and artists offer practical advice on drawing, choosing landmarks, and digital tools.

I loved this book. I wanted to grab a pen and map my childhood neighborhood right away. This is a manual for all kinds of maps. It provides directions for both manual and digital map-making in the most delightful ways. From start to finish, it was full of interesting illustrations, ideas on what to map, instructions on making significant marks, and how to choose landmarks.

Loved it. I think I already said that. Sold. Go get a copy!

Wow, this is such a cool book! As a writing professor, I've found it is a wonderful assignment to ask my students to create personal maps and then to write about them. This is a great assignment in nonfiction, memoir, research, technical, and other types of writing. This book will inspire students as they tackle this type of writing assignment. I especially like the section on Sarah King's work. I look forward to buying the book in print.

A wonderful book that contains a lot of amazing art works, tips and tutorials. It inspired me to start illustrating my own maps. I highly recommend this book to art lovers, journal artists and people who love to travel.

This book is delightful. Each page is visually appealing as they introduce children to map making. Traditional supplies are covered, then the book is broken up into sections by various map makers. Each one shares their favorite mediums and offers hints and suggestions to inspire children to make their own maps. We see the artists share some of their own creations step by step, then conclude with the final product.

I am creative in some ways, but drawing skipped my gene pool; my sisters gained that natural talent from my mother and grandmother. All the same, as Hennie Haworth opened her section, she shared how to draw a tree, and I thought, "Hey, I could do that!"

One note, though -- while these artists share great suggestions and offer a lot of pictorial ideas, there is some expectation of previously established drawing ability, with this book just to guide you with how to focus that skill to create an engaging map scene (one more example from Haworth's section: she starts with a sketch of a building, then goes into helpful detail as to how she would overlap colors and use pencils and pens for additional texture, but she expects you to know how to draw and just gain insight into how to shade and detail your existing drawing).

For children with digital resources, Hill uses his section to walk through the steps he takes in Photoshop and Illustrator to create his maps.

Plus, this book makes a point that maps can include more than just streets -- one artist has a visual recipe and a pictorial heavy page on how to change a bike tire. Another drew her profile with intricate details on the various parts of her brain based on what they control (short-term memory, etc). They also remind children that it's fine to play with perspective and distance and shrink things closer together to keep the visual interest.

Each section is engaging, with interesting details and helpful tips and closes with a gallery of that artist's work. This book would draw people to flip through it, and if I left it on our table with drawing supplies nearby, I have no doubt either of my girls would get pulled in and want to create a map of their own.

Beautiful. It was a pleasure to read about the instruments used, and the different portions of a map one should pay attention to. Very beautiful book for map lovers.

This book was a feast for the eyes! It is always interesting to give a number of artists the same topic and see how they each interpret it. I very much enjoyed the step by step instructions that were given when working with different media, but also that they were not judgmental and offered a number of variations. Definitely a worthwhile read

I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know much about mapmaking, but I was really curious and wanted to try and learn at least a little bit about the subject. The Art of Map Illustration is a perfect novel for getting your toes wet, so to speak.
For being an introductory sort of book it was surprisingly comprehensive, pulling in artists using multiple methods and styles. Four artists are included, and each one focused on different elements, ways to render the artwork, and what they felt was most important.
Hennie Haworth showed us some of his hand drawn maps and the techniques he used. He also covered the basics of map making (like what you’d see on a map besides the most obvious bits).
Stuart Hill makes his maps digitally, and he gave us a pretty good understanding of what was involved for that process. He had a lot of fun examples that helped to show the difference in results for hand drawn versus digitally drawn.
James Gulliver Hancock appeared to use more of a blend between digital and hand drawn. His work has a digitized look to it while not being quite as ‘clean’ as being fully digitally rendered. I actually really enjoyed the end results for his work in particular. He also had fun doing more unique works, like the solar system and things of that nature.
And last there’s Sarah King. Her work is hand drawn, but she does things in a completely different way from Hennie Haworth. Her pieces had more details in the drawings – the lines almost becoming a texture in themselves.
This was a really fun introduction for map making. I had failed to realize how much went into maps besides just the map itself, but this novel opened my eyes to that fact. I really enjoyed each artist’s unique style for creating their maps, and having a good example of different styles helped me to understand the major points they were trying to get across.

This was such a creative and inspiring book! I wish I had read it before my trip to New York. I have always loved the idea of bringing a journal with you everywhere you go when traveling to a new city, so that you can jot down small things you've done, conversations you overheard, and interesting things you've seen. The idea of creating maps, of these locations, and adding in small drawing of buildings, attractions, parks, etc is immensely exciting to me. Personally, i'm not a very good drawer... but i could still see something like this being a life long keepsake. The book came with simple instructions, and great ideas. I couldn't get enough of it. I will be purchasing this for a more artistic friend of mine, who is going backpacking across Europe for her honeymoon.


A huge thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I truly appreciate it!

I loved this! Different styles and gorgeous illustrations to get inspiration, but also helpful tips and ideas

You can find a lot of inspiration and tips from these 4 artists as they show you their process of mapmaking through real projects from their portfolios.

Hennie Haworth shows you, step by step, how to start your illustration and the order in which you should add streets, greenery, buildings, etc. The art is fabulous and the explanations make it easy for you to achieve a similar style. Very useful for traditional artists. You can find tips on how to use and combine different media like water colors, colored pencils, markers, etc. (I'm in love with her style)

Stuart Hills guides you throw the process of creating maps digitally, with a lot of tips and techniques like how he achieves a rough/ handmade feeling in his designs. Some tips are only useful if you use Photoshop and Illustrator but most of them can be achieved using other programs.

James Gulliver Hancock shows you how he makes use of both, traditional and digital elements, to achieve organic yet modern illustrations. A lot of inspiration here for city maps as well as other types of informative illustrations (my favorite was the illustrated recipe).

Sarah King shares the traditional skills she uses for map illustration. Unlike the previous artists, her work is mostly black and white and has a very unique style where words are stylized and gracefully blend with the rest of the illustration. A lot of tips for those using pen and ink and even a mixed media approach using markers on wood.

This is not an "absolute beginners guide to cartography" or a project-based book, but it works for anyone who has a desire to express ideas through drawings or try cartography and wants to learn by watching how professionals tackle these type of projects, how cool is that?. *I read it from an eARC

Thank you, NetGalley for the preview of this Digital ARC.

Illustrative Map making has always been something that I have admired and scared to try at the same time. But after this book, I have decided to give it a go. I really, really loved the step-by-step instructions that the author provided. It was very easy to follow. I think I will begin by making a map of my neighborhood.